The Smaato Blog

The Smaato Blog

Apps have transformed our lives, enabling mobile devices to replace both mp3 players and the TV weatherman. We now spend more time using apps than ever before, and the recent shift of ad spending towards in-app reflects this fact. As uncovered in our recently-released Q1 2017 Global Trends in Mobile Advertising report, in-app ad spending reached a record high on the Smaato platform in Q1 2017 with a 91% share of total mobile ad spending (versus mobile web).

We analyzed over one trillion ad requests on the Smaato platform in Q1 2017 and saw that, of this amped-up mobile ad spending,a higher share went to in-app than ever before. But this rising tide did not lift all boats equally — certain app categories fared better than others.

Today, we’re pleased to announce “Phase One” of our new adsquare integration. This first-ever exchange-side integration gives Smaato’s 450+ DSPs and ad networks access to historical and real-time global audience data targeting. Through a combination of Smaato’s premium in-app inventory and adsquare’s vast data portfolio, demand partners will now be able to target unique audiences at scale. Smaato publishers will also, in turn, see an increase in the quality and value of their inventory by serving contextual audiences to advertisers in real-time.

When Apple released the first iPhone ten years ago today, a revolution was born that would change our lives and create multiple billion-dollar industries. To commemorate the 10th anniversary of this monumental mobile moment, we are taking a look at how much the iPhone has changed our lives, impacted advertising and defined a new generation.

It's not that the iPhone was the first mobile phone nor even the first smartphone. The invention of the Smartphone dates back to the 1970s, and in the later part of the 1990s, many mobile phone users began carrying PDAs (personal digital assistants) that ran on various systems such as Blackberry OS and Palm OS. Nonetheless, everything changed when Steve Jobs pulled the iPhone out of his pocket in early 2007.

2017 started off with a bang for the mobile advertising world with both mobile ad spending and ad space values growing globally. For our recently released Q1 2017 Global Trends in Mobile Advertising, we analyzed over one trillion global mobile ad requests on the Smaato platform to gain insight into the latest mobile advertising trends. While the world's largest mobile advertising market (the US) continued to see healthy growth, China was the world's growth driver among the Top 10 global mobile advertising markets.

What really matters to app developers? High on the list is monetization strategy, one of the most important challenges for any app developer today. An effective mobile monetization solution must offer developers high yields with consistency, transparency and reliability.

Today we would like to share with you the impressive success story of one of our large customer partners – Microsoft.

In 2016, we released the Smaato Demand Platform (SDX), which gave our demand partners the ability to specify the type of mobile inventory they would like to receive from Smaato.

SDX offers granular, self-service controls designed to make mobile advertising spend as targeted and efficient as possible for our buyers.

Today we’re pleased to announce a new SDX feature called Inventory Discovery, which delivers more powerful and refined controls for Smaato's demand partners. We have added a new Discovery tab to SDX that allows buyers to see and then filter their view of all available mobile inventory flowing through the Smaato Platform.

Smaato operates one of the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplaces. Our platform handles up to 10 billion mobile ads every day around the world. One of the challenges we, as Smaato developers, face daily is successfully integrating and communicating with the vast variety of technical interfaces used by our many partners who transact on our marketplace platform.

In this blog post, we wanted to give the technically inclined among you a glimpse into the challenges and successes we face in solving issues, in this case, related to monolithic applications by implementing extensible components using the Groovy language and also discuss why our developers chose Groovy over other available options.

We recently released our new Global Trends in Mobile Advertising Report for Q3 2016 with insights drawn from in-depth analysis of up to 300 billion ad impressions generated across over one billion unique mobile devices every month on the Smaato platform. This report provides key facts, mobile trends and ad spending insights from both in-app and mobile web ad inventory over the third quarter of 2016.

Worldwide mobile ad spending continued to post robust growth (+64%) in Q3 versus the same quarter last year on the Smaato platform. The America’s region grew most (+77%), while APAC and EMEA followed with healthy gains of +64% and +22% respectively.

As you may be aware, Apple has announced some changes that will affect your iOS apps. Starting on January 1, 2017, all apps and app updates submitted to the App Store must be compliant with App Transport Security (ATS). This means that ATS will be enabled as a default setting, which will prevent your iOS apps from making non-secure connections.

Download the latest Smaato SDK iOS v.8.1.0 which includes the necessary support to ensure that monetization continues to work as intended once ATS compliance is required for your iOS apps.

Today, we'd like to highlight an important but often unseen hero of Smaato's mobile advertising marketplace—our Market Quality initiative. It ensures that Smaato's global community of app developers, publishers and mobile advertisers can access a clean, protected mobile advertising marketplace—safeguarded from malware, click fraud, bots and more.

Fraud is an uncomfortable topic for most of us in the mobile advertising industry. No one wants to admit the possibility of their business being undermined by fraudulent traffic, bots and inappropriate ads. Meanwhile, fraud persists, with the IAB estimating that mobile ad fraud alone is costing advertisers around $1.3 billion per year. Thankfully, there has been a concerted effort in recent years to discuss what we as an industry must do to confront it.